Have you looked at it? It's an abomination. The point of SICP isn't Scheme or the syntax of Scheme, but what it represents. Whoever made the Javascript rewrite didn't understand that. You can't write a metacircular interpreter in Javascript, because Javascript is not homoiconic.
I'm pretty sure someone wrote a very basic, very literal scheme to JavaScript transpiler and just ran the book's code through it. The results look nothing like what any normal person would write.
You can't write a metacircular interpreter in Javascript, because Javascript is not homoiconic.
Is that a downside? I never wrote or used metacurcular interpreter in my life and still don’t know why I had to read about it. Is it an interesting implementation technique of lisp? Yes. Does anyone really need that?
You can rip off that part and everything that follows and that will be enough for a regular programmer. No one itt needs to know how to design metacircular interpreter on register machines.
It allows the book to skip things like lexing and parsing and instead go straight to its main course: transforming, executing and compiling syntax trees.
